Features – Olympicshttp://olympics.time.com
News, Photos and Videos from the London 2012 Summer GamesFri, 09 Dec 2016 13:29:04 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://1.gravatar.com/blavatar/53106f6a2616452b1b756a3488c9fb01?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngFeatures – Olympicshttp://olympics.time.com
After London 2012, Will Sponsors and Media Finally Embrace the Paralympics?http://olympics.time.com/2012/09/07/after-london-2012-will-sponsors-and-media-finally-embrace-the-paralympics/
http://olympics.time.com/2012/09/07/after-london-2012-will-sponsors-and-media-finally-embrace-the-paralympics/#respondSat, 08 Sep 2012 02:00:24 +0000http://olympics.time.com/?p=2347728]]>Even before the men’s 100m final began at the Olympic stadium in London on Thursday night, tens of thousands of sports fans were chanting for the home-crowd favorite, 19-year-old Jonnie Peacock. Less than 11 seconds later, the stadium nearly erupted as the British Paralympian sprinter outpaced champion Oscar Pistorius, crossed the finish line — arms pumping, blade flashing – and won the gold medal. Chants of “Pea-cock! Pea-cock! Pea-cock,” filled the air. It’s a pretty safe bet that a large portion of the six million viewers who tuned into the race on television across Britain were also sharing in the crowd’s exuberance.

Though it’s hardly surprising that scores of Britons were cheering for Peacock’s awe-inspiring performance, it should be a wake up call to broadcasters and corporate sponsors who’ve been notoriously slow to embrace the Paralympics. While the Olympics receive seemingly exhaustive coverage from the global media, much of that focus drops off for the Paralympics, which takes place weeks later. Olympic athletes routinely become household names through brand sponsorships and prolific media coverage, but Paralympians are largely ignored.

At first glance, the Paralympics should be the easiest event in the world to promote: every four years some of the world’s most phenomenal athletes compete against one another in mind-boggling feats of strength and will, after overcoming some of the most devastating, heart-wrenching, worst-case-scenario tragedies imaginable.

Yet in the past, promotion of the Paralympic Games, especially in the U.S., has been dismal or non-existent. This year NBC, who has the rights to the Games, isn’t showing any live coverage at all and will only broadcast four one-hour long segments of the Paralympics in total. Compare this with the hundreds of hours of coverage they devoted to the Olympic Games and it’s hard not to cringe.

The way individual athletes are treated is also noticeably different. Sure, Jonnie Peacock is now a household name in Britain, but he only became so recently. And for much of the world, simply naming a Paralympian — save for Oscar Pistorius, who ran in the Olympic Games as well — would likely be a struggle. But athletes who’ve competed in the Olympic Games, like Team GB’s Jessica Ennis or Victoria Pendleton, became recognizable figures months ago as corporate brands eagerly snatched them up for ad campaigns.

But it’s possible that London 2012 could mark a change in the way the Paralympics are marketed both by the media and by sponsors.

In Britain, broadcasting rights to the Paralympics were granted to Channel 4, which seized on the opportunity to promote the event like never before. “Many UK viewers had not actually seen the Paralympics before, certainly not in mainstream numbers,” says Dan Brooke, the chief marketing and communications officer for Channel 4. “So not only did we have to put the Paralympics on the map, but we had to reposition it.” The public broadcasters launched a mutli-platform campaign that included social media, billboards that cheekily read “Thanks for the warm-up”, newspaper editorials, TV spots, online videos and one simply sublime commercial.

The effort paid off. In addition to the six million viewers the broadcaster pulled in for Peacock’s victory, Channel 4 has also reportedly drawn record numbers of viewers almost every night since the Paralympics began; the ratings for the event’s opening ceremony were highest they’d been in ten years. “Most importantly,” Brooke adds, “people have been telling us that attitudes to people with impairments have been changing in one really enormous, bounding leap. And that, for a public broadcaster like ourselves, is exactly the kind of thing we were put on earth to do.”

London 2012 has also seen corporate sponsors eager to spearhead the Paralympics promotion. The massive supermarket chain Sainsbury’s bid to be Paralympic-only sponsors, rather than act as sponsors for both sets of Games. Jat Sahota, the company’s head of sponsorship, said that they were keen to jump on board as sponsors of what they predict is a growing event. “If we waited for the Paralympics to become big, that’d be the wrong attitude,” he said. “We wanted to help them become big.”

Alexis Schafer of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) explains that while there’s still a long way to go when it comes to promoting the Paralympics and marketing the Games, accomplishing the task will be a three-way effort between the organizing committees, the corporate sponsors who provide funding and the media. “It’s a constant dialogue,” he says, adding that the IPC is a young organization, created only in 1989, and it’s still continually trying to build the Paralympics. “But I think we have to take it step by step. It’s just sometimes you realize that this progress isn’t as quick as some people would wish.”

But he has high hopes for Sochi 2014 and Rio 2016, the homes of the next Winter and Summer Games, respectively. If this summer’s Games are any indication, he feels the Paralympics are headed in the right direction. “I think it’s fantastic to see here in London that we really got it right, we really got it going.”

]]>http://olympics.time.com/2012/09/07/after-london-2012-will-sponsors-and-media-finally-embrace-the-paralympics/feed/0Miscellanyhttp://olympics.time.com/category/miscellany/https://timeolympics.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/paraoly_marketing.jpg?w=240paraoly_marketingmgibson1271Target Practice: How the U.S. Became an Archery Powerhttp://olympics.time.com/2012/07/26/target-practice-how-the-u-s-became-an-archery-power/
http://olympics.time.com/2012/07/26/target-practice-how-the-u-s-became-an-archery-power/#respondThu, 26 Jul 2012 09:45:18 +0000http://olympics.time.com/?p=2343284]]>Quick — can you name the top archery nation in the world? Great Britain, perhaps, if you’re thinking of Robin Hood and his merry band of Sherwood Forest shooters. Or China, since they’re good at pretty much everything. (And no, the Hunger Games’ Panem doesn’t count.)

What about the US, and, in close second, South Korea. Yes, that’s right — the United States of America is the leading nation in archery, and has been since 2008, according to the World Archery Federation, which ranks countries based on how athletes finish in international competitions.

How did the US get to the top of the archery heap? While The Hunger Games has certainly helped to boost interest in the sport — participation in junior development clubs in the US jumped by 75% in the past few years, and searches for ‘archery’ continue to surge by as much as 32% in recent months — the buildup actually began years ago, when Ki Sik Lee was hired as the national head coach. Korean by birth, Lee was recruited from Australia, where he had been lured to refashion the national program Down Under.

American archers have long excelled at shooting, but with a compound bow that’s entirely different from that used in Olympic eligible competition. At the Games, athletes shoot with a recurve bow, which comes without the magnified sites and the weight-distributing system that lightens some of the load on archers as they pull the bow back. (Compound bow hunters compete in 3D shooting events throughout the US for considerable prize money, but recurve competitions aren’t as lucrative.)

With so many talented compound shooters, though, USA Archery began asking why the US couldn’t nurture an Olympic-caliber cadre. Lee was brought on to do just that, and in London, we’ll see the fruits of his unique training program, which has been responsible for grooming US archers for the past six years. Brady Ellison, an early student of Lee’s who switched from compound bows to recurve, is the #1 ranked male recurve archer in the world, and will shoot for gold against South Korean Im Dong Hyun, who competes despite being legally blind. New to the recurve format during the Beijing Games, Ellison says this time, he’s shooting for the right to call himself an Olympic champion. “In the last four years, I’ve shot at every tournament I could think of, and gotten international experience so I’ve learned the bow and my body a lot better,” the Arizona native says. “Every single shot I’ve taken in practice has been toward that gold medal.”

USA Archery is hoping Ellison’s quick rise and performance at the Olympics will get more youngsters eager to shoot like Brady. And thanks to Lee’s strategy, which the federation has now adopted as the National Training System, the sport will be ready for the new entrants.

After training athletes in Korea, where the archery program’s driving philosophy is ‘the more the better’ when it comes to arrows shot, Lee realized that the system wasn’t sustainable, because it caused too many injuries. He came up with a new training program, he says, to reduce the amount of strain on athletes who were shooting as many as 600 or more arrows a day. He consulted with scientists who understood the biomechanics of how the body works, and how muscles, tendons and joints respond to stress, to devise a new method that alleviated the strain on vulnerable muscles and instead exploited the body’s stronger joints. Watch Ellison line up for his shot and you’ll see he pulls the bow back by keeping his elbow in alignment with his target, which creates an angle that provides more stability to the shoulder and allows the shooter to make a cleaner, truer shot at the bullseye. By aligning the relevant moving parts, the archer reduces the chance that a stray movement will pull the arrow off course. “With this holding technique, you have a bigger window to hit your goal comfortably,” says Lee. Essentially, “the shooter can store more energy in his body than when he is shooting by hand.”

The more solid set up also means that US archers can use a bow that is four to five times heavier than the standard 50 or so pound bow that most competitors use. The heft can provide additional stability for shots, further improving US archers’ odds of hitting their mark. “Archery shooting should not be by hand, but should use more of the body, or back tension,” says Lee.

Translated into lay speak, that means a practically unbeatable way of slinging an arrow. “It starts with the way archers stand, the way they hold their posture, with a flatter back so you use stronger muscles to shoot the bow, and use your bone structure to support the shot,” says Teresa Iaconi, marketing director for USA Archery and a certified national training system coach. Iaconi admits that at first, “I was one of the coaches that poo-poo’d [Lee’s] method. “I couldn’t understand it.”

Lee says it wasn’t easy to convince coaches who had been teaching the same archery technique from centuries ago, focusing on shooting from the hand, rather than exploiting the entire body. Shooting techniques, he says, haven’t changed much since the days of Robin Hood, as coaches taught mostly by instinct and experience, rather than an understanding of the science of arrow flight. “Before coach Lee, I hadn’t seen anything that was based in science in teaching archery,” says Iaconi. Which only made Lee’s job harder. “If I wasn’t so convinced about my philosophy,” he says, “I probably would have cried every day. It was really painful at times, arguing with people.”

Doing is better than talking, however, so all it took for coaches like Iaconi was a workshop where Lee explained his biomechanics-based technique, and allowed them to try it for themselves. He had written a book on his theories, but without seeing it executed, it was hard to convince coaches it was worth a try. Before Lee was hired, USA Archery didn’t have a formal technique, but adopted a catch-as-catch-can approach where former competitive archers passed along their experience and strategies to shooting hopefuls. “I said we needed a system, and we needed to develop a coaching system more widely to educate the coaches,” Lee says.

“Now, people are talking about why the Americans are shooting differently. Before they didn’t care what we did, because Americans weren’t at a high level internationally. But now that we are #1, they are looking at why,” he says. And in London, all eyes will indeed be on the US, to see if the new system really hits the target.

]]>http://olympics.time.com/2012/07/26/target-practice-how-the-u-s-became-an-archery-power/feed/0Olympicshttp://olympics.time.com/category/olympics/https://timeolympics.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/oly_ellison_0723.jpg?w=240Brady Ellisonapark7Diving: The New Sport for Wunderkindshttp://olympics.time.com/2012/07/26/diving-the-new-sport-for-wunderkinds/
http://olympics.time.com/2012/07/26/diving-the-new-sport-for-wunderkinds/#respondThu, 26 Jul 2012 04:30:00 +0000http://olympics.time.com/?p=2342337]]>In Mexico, a girl’s 15th birthday—el quince—can be the most important milestone of her young life, a coming-out celebration as special as graduations and weddings. But when Carolina Mendoza turned 15 in April, she wasn’t about to trade her swimsuit for a taffeta gown. In February, at age 14, Mendoza qualified for the London Olympics in women’s 10-m platform diving, becoming one of the youngest Mexicans ever to secure a trip to an Olympiad. No debutante ball was going to distract her from training for her sport’s most coveted prize. “Right now,” she told Time at the sleek national sports center in Mexico City, “I’m not interested in parties.”

Women’s gymnastics used to be the Olympic arena where the youngest seemed the ablest. Romania’s Nadia ­Comaneci ruled the 1976 Games at 14. But the minimum age for that sport was raised to 16 in 1997. Diving, for which the age limit is still 14 for 10-m platform, is the new kinder-kingdom in Olympic sport. In 2008 the women’s 10-m gold medal went to a 15-year-old, China’s Chen Ruolin, while the men’s competition featured 14-year-old British sensation Tom Daley, who won 10-m gold at the European Championships at 13. (He was eligible because he turned 14 by year’s end.)

All this youth in a sport that demands maximum focus at 40 m.p.h. over 1.5 seconds, during gyrations that would put most people in neck braces. “Consider all the iPods and texting—a 15-year-old’s mind is like a wandering gypsy,” says JoAnn Dahlkoetter, a clinical psychologist who works with young Olympic athletes. Then, she says, add all the pressures a 15-year-old faces that a 25-year-old doesn’t: pleasing parents, attending school, hiring your first agent before you’ve had your first date. “Young divers at this level have a unique ability to get into the zone very quickly.” That’s Mendoza, says her trainer, Jorge Carreón: “She is extremely focused. She has all the physical qualities—elasticity, flexibility—but most of all she has no fear. She concentrates in a way that I seldom see in one so young.”

Not even a serious accident in 2010 could keep Mendoza off the platform. Her head struck her training trampoline so hard that it left a 15-inch gash on her face and an exposed nose fracture. A few weeks after an operation, she was competing again. Mendoza finished fifth in the 10-m event at this year’s world championships (Chen, now 19, was first) and has a good shot at bringing home Mexico’s first individual Olympic medal for women’s diving. “I am not scared at all, not even after my accident,” she says. “When I am on the platform, I hear nothing, see nothing but the water.”

Diving can be like flying a stunt plane blind, without dashboard instruments to guide you. It demands a keen sense of kinesthetics, “the ability to feel what your body is doing in the air even when you can’t see,” says Dahlkoetter. Younger divers may have an advantage in that. Aside from weighing less—one reason pubescent female gymnasts do so well—“they often do have less fear,” Dahlkoetter says. “More of a daredevil curiosity.” Ironically, Carreón, whose students usually begin training with him at the tender age of 5 or 6, thought Mendoza too old when she showed up at the national sports center at age 11 wanting to try a new sport. Mendoza seemed ambivalent herself. “My only wish then was to become an acrobat and perform with the Cirque du Soleil,” she says. Although Mendoza had never dived before, Carreón says it took no more than 15 minutes of watching her to change his mind.

A diver has to be both fish and bird, and much of Mendoza’s preternatural ability stemmed from her experience in both swimming and gymnastics. When Mendoza discovered she could combine the two in diving, she was hooked. Mendoza, who learned to walk at 9 months and to swim at age 2, has DNA as well as drive going for her. Her parents are accomplished athletes—her mother Nadia was a Mexican national track-and-field champion in the 110-m hurdles—and her uncle was an Olympic cyclist at the 1968 Mexico City Games. Which may be why Carola, as her friends and family call her, seems as comfortable living and attending school at the capital’s sports complex, known as the National High-Performance Center (CNAR), as she is training there.

She’s also a well-adjusted kid, one of the CNAR’s most committed divers yet one of its most playful and ebullient teens, sporting a smile and a pert, mop-top haircut that seems straight out of an early Beatles photo. “I love what I do,” she says. “I would like a room of my own though,” she adds. “Right now I’m sharing with two other girls—they do table tennis.” The Olympic spotlight has a way of testing that kind of innocence.

Mendoza has five dives to perfect before the first round in London on August 8, including the grueling backward two-and-a-half somersault with one-and-a-half twists in the pike position, and her­ favorite—the Cirque du Soleil–esque backward three somersaults in the tuck position from a handstand on the platform. She’ll be up against some youthful competition too. Chen is again the 10-m favorite, followed by her Chinese teammate Hu Yadan, 16, who finished second at the world championships. As for that quince, Mendoza’s mother hopes the family can still host a party: “Not too big, when Carola has a little time.” But that could be a while. “I can easily go to three more Olympics,” Mendoza says. By then she’ll be 27—and perhaps putting off a wedding, rather than a debutante’s party.

]]>http://olympics.time.com/2012/07/26/diving-the-new-sport-for-wunderkinds/feed/0Featureshttp://olympics.time.com/category/features/https://timeolympics.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/carolina.jpg?w=240carolinadlvandInside Camp Karolyi: Building the U.S. Women’s Olympic Gymnastics Teamhttp://olympics.time.com/2012/07/16/camp-karolyi-how-and-why-martha-karolyi-defines-u-s-womens-gymnastics/
http://olympics.time.com/2012/07/16/camp-karolyi-how-and-why-martha-karolyi-defines-u-s-womens-gymnastics/#respondMon, 16 Jul 2012 04:29:44 +0000http://olympics.time.com/?p=2342180]]>The girls aren’t around, but their presence lingers everywhere: their images hang in larger-than-life posters that cover the walls — Olympic and world champions, frozen in fierce, midcompetition poses; their chalky white footprints cover the mats that litter the gym floor, tracing the crazy circuits of routine after routine performed at the USA Gymnastics National Team Training Center. The resin that anchors tiny gymnasts precariously to their equipment cakes their calloused hands too and is shed in ghostly prints on the 10-cm balance beam, on the uneven bars that loom 2.4 m off the ground and even on the restroom door. That might be the dusty legacy of where the reigning Olympic all-around champion jumped onto the beam; those could be the footprints of the country’s best gymnast on the uneven bars; that might be where the world vault champion stuck a difficult landing.

It’s a rare quiet day at the gym, a respite in between the busy days when anywhere from 20 to 30 members of the national team are tumbling, vaulting, balancing or swinging through their routines. This is where every girl who wants to be an elite gymnast must come, at some point in her career, to pay tithings in the form of blood, sweat and often tears, to coach Martha Karolyi. This is where every gymnast with Olympic dreams earns the right to represent the U.S. and wear the coveted team leotard. This is where Karolyi puts the girls to the test, once a month, for four strenuous days. It’s called training camp, and while there are bunk beds, shared cabins and bucolic surroundings deep in the woods of New Waverly, Texas — complete with lakes, boats, tennis courts and a pool — it’s nothing like the carefree summer excursions that most of us know.

“I make it very clear for the girls. They come here for one single reason, that’s to train,” says Karolyi in her sharp, Hungarian-inflected English.

The remoteness of the location is actually an advantage, at least in Karolyi’s eyes. A 30-to-40-minute drive from Houston, reached after a nearly 10-minute ride along a dirt road that winds through a forest where deer and wild boars roam, the training center is the focal point of the 1,200-hectare ranch that Karolyi and her husband, gymnastics icon Bela, share. For the girls, making the pilgrimage has but one purpose — to impress Karolyi. While a selection committee that includes Karolyi, a USA Gymnastics representative and an athlete representative determines the Olympic team, everyone — coaches and gymnasts alike — knows that the person with the strongest voice is Karolyi. “She is the big lady,” says Shawn Johnson, the Olympic all-around silver medalist in Beijing. And the way to Karolyi’s heart? Nothing short of perfection. “We strive for perfection. I state that every moment when I have a chance,” Karolyi says. “If that is not your goal, then you are in the wrong place.”

It’s a hard goal to attain, perfection — some may even say by definition, impossible — but the drive to achieve it has made Karolyi, and the U.S. women’s gymnastics team, among the most successful in the world. It’s also drawn criticism for the strict and, according to at least one former student, abusive methods it’s pushed the Karolyis to employ. But for Martha, it’s an absolutely realistic goal — because she saw it happen, in 1976, when she coached a young Romanian girl named Nadia Comaneci. At the Olympic Games in Montreal, Comaneci, only 14, scored not one, but seven perfect scores on her way to winning the all-around competition. Since becoming the U.S. national team coordinator in 2001, Karolyi has collected an impressive case of trophies, leading the American “girls,” as she calls them, to 59 world or Olympic medals, including unprecedented back-to-back all-around championships in 2004 and 2008. That’s the prestige event of the sport, in which a single gymnast is recognized for outperforming her competitors in all four gymnastics events — vault, balance beam, uneven bars and floor exercise. There are no perfect scores in gymnastics anymore, but that doesn’t stop Karolyi from searching for it, seeking it out among the dozens of gymnasts that fly from around the country to log hours of tumbling and twirling at the National Team Training Center.

Karolyi, however, faced an even greater challenge this year. For the first time since becoming national team coordinator in 2001, she and her system were put to a different test. For the past three Olympic Games, U.S. gymnasts and coaches have agreed to an unorthodox selection process that includes not just the Olympic Trials, but an additional “trial,” conducted at the Karolyi ranch, several weeks prior to the Games, during which Karolyi and the selection committee put the girls through a mock meet before making their final decisions about the Olympic squad. “It was almost like anything you did before the camp selection didn’t really matter,” says Carly Patterson, the 2004 all-around Olympic champion. “Once again, you had to prove yourself all over. That was definitely very scary.” But because of the short time between Olympic Trials and the start of the Games in London, Karolyi was forced to name the five-person team at the Olympic Trials. “I always like to wait longer, but I feel [the Trials] created an atmosphere very close to what we will get at the Olympic Games, so maybe it was a good factor to show who handled the stress,” she says.

Naming the squad this way makes Karolyi nervous heading into London since gymnasts training so hard are prone to injuries and rejiggering such a small team, carefully selected to give the U.S. the greatest chance of winning the team gold, can have devastating effects on the girls’ performance. And despite the fact that under her leadership, the U.S. team now rivals world powers in the sport, including Russia, Romania and China, no U.S. women’s squad has won the team gold since 1996. That’s the medal that Karolyi wants. Going into London, the U.S. women are the world champions. Four of the five girls on that team are heading to the Games, including the reigning all-around world champion Jordyn Wieber. For Karolyi, the ultimate vindication of her vision would be a team gold medal and a three-peat in the all-around event. If that happens, the achievement would be as much a personal victory for Karolyi as it is a professional one — a validation of the decision she made years ago to defect from Romania to the U.S. and build a brand-new gymnastics powerhouse.

]]>http://olympics.time.com/2012/07/16/camp-karolyi-how-and-why-martha-karolyi-defines-u-s-womens-gymnastics/feed/0Gymnasticshttp://olympics.time.com/category/gymnastics/https://timeolympics.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/kerolyi_120512_0458.jpg?w=240Camp Karolyiapark7How to Compete in the Olympics While Fasting for Ramadanhttp://olympics.time.com/2012/07/12/how-to-compete-in-the-olympics-while-fasting-for-ramadan/
http://olympics.time.com/2012/07/12/how-to-compete-in-the-olympics-while-fasting-for-ramadan/#respondThu, 12 Jul 2012 16:25:50 +0000http://olympics.time.com/?p=2342195]]>When an estimated 3,500 Muslim athletes come to the London Olympics this summer, the pinnacle of their athletic careers will directly coincide with one of the most important periods in their spiritual calendar. This year, all 17 days of athletic competition take place during the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims are required to fast and refrain from drinking water from sunrise to sunset. The overlap of Ramadan and the Olympics may prove a physical and spiritual challenge to many of the observant athletes–but in many ways the Olympic spirit and the holy month share a core essence that makes the overlap somehow appropriate and harmonious: sacrificing the self and practicing self-control in the bid to achieve perfection.

At its core, Islam is a very practical and flexible religion, one that has historically accommodated difficult circumstances. Many Muslim athletes at the Games this year will avail themselves of that flexibility, others, particularly observant women, have found ways to compete while adhering to traditional interpretations of Islamic law that require them to cover their bodies. Top ranked U.S. sabre fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad will be the first American woman to compete in hijab, following in the footsteps of Bahrain’s Ruqaya Al Ghasara a sprinter who, in 2004, was the first athlete to compete in a specially designed athletic head-to-toe covering. This year Afghanistan’s boxer Sadaf Rahimi will do the same, even as she defies tribal custom—and the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islamic law that prohibits blows to the face—by boxing in a room full of men.

Like many Muslim athletes, both Muhammad and Rahimi will have to answer the religiously fraught question of whether or not they will fast during competition: whether spirituality takes precedence over physical prowess and the tantalizing chance to win a medal for their respective nations. What was once a private affair between an adherent and her God has become a public litmus test of faith. Rahimi has said she will not fast while she is in London, citing an historic exemption for travelers. Ghulam Naseri, an Islamic scholar from her hometown of Kabul, says that the Koran makes allowances for travelers “more than a camel ride away from home.” She will make up those missed days of fasting when she is back in Afghanistan and no longer worried about being at her physical peak.

British rower Moe Sbihi won’t need that option. He consulted with religious leaders (and a Moroccan goalkeeper for Real Mallorca who never fasted during his time playing for Spain’s La Liga), to come up with his own solution: he will donate 1,800 meals to the poor, 60 meals per day of not fasting, to fulfill his spiritual obligations.

To Fawaz A. Gerges, Director of the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics, the varying approaches to the Ramadan fast are a demonstration of Islam’s inherent dynamism. “The element of practicality and flexibility is really fundamental to how Islamic scholars deal with difficult situations. The Olympics are no different – what we are seeing here is the rule, not the exception,” he says, pointing out that out that most Muslim athletes have said in interviews that they will not fast while in London. “They are finding ways and means to compensate, whether it’s doing charity work, feeding the poor, or postponing their fasts.”

Not only will this year will mark the highest participation of Muslim athletes, it will also be the first year that every single country is represented by both male and female athletes. For the first time Qatar and Brunei will be sending women. Even Saudi Arabia, after a long debate, has reluctantly agreed to send two women— Sarah Attar in the 800 meters and Wodjan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani in judo. It’s an historic achievement for both the Olympics, and for Muslim women across the world. What better timing than for this to happen during Ramadan?